You already know the situation: the Willow Fire has burned thousands of acres west of Leadville, and while the Leadville race series has announced the go ahead for the remainder of the season, race organizers have been clear that a reroute is in the works and details are still being finalized. And as of this writing (9:45am on Monday July 20), we still don’t know course details, including the route for the Stage race set to start later this week.
I know how much of your season has been built around this one day. The alarm clock before dawn, the back-to-back long training sessions, the indoor miles when you'd rather be anywhere else, all of it aimed at a specific course you've studied, ridden, and rehearsed in your mind a hundred times. So if the idea of a reroute has you frustrated, or even a little grief-stricken, that's a completely normal response. It would be strange if it didn't sting.
But here's the thing about training for months on end: it's rarely just the body we're training. The athletes who show up strongest on race day, especially in a year like this one, are the ones who've also trained their capacity to pivot. That's not a consolation prize. It's arguably the skill that separates a good performance from a great one, particularly on a day when conditions refuse to cooperate with the plan.
A Framework for the Pivot: ADAPT
From a sport psychology perspective, I often teach a five-step framework for exactly this kind of moment, when a race or a plan blows up and emotion threatens to take the wheel before reason does. It's called ADAPT, and it maps onto our current situation almost perfectly:
Accept: Before you problem-solve anything, pause and accept the situation as it is. A wildfire has forced changes on the course you trained for, and no amount of frustration changes that fact. Accepting it rather than fighting it is what clears your head enough to think straight about what you want to do next. Accepting it does not mean you have to like it, only that you acknowledge that this is the new reality.
Diagnose: Once the initial frustration settles, take honest stock of what's actually different. In this case, it's initially relatively straightforward: the course you’ve been preparing for is altered. But on a deeper level, there may be more at stake. There may be a sense of loss for not being able to test yourself on iconic portions of the course. You may be questioning how your performance racks and stacks compared to other years. Take a moment to reflect on what is really at stake here.
Analyze: Now put your problem-solving mind to work. What have you been training for this whole time? The ability to persist and pursue in a challenging environment. What fitness accomplishments have you achieved this year? A deep aerobic base, altitude-adapted lungs, a fueling strategy that's been dialed in all summer, and pacing discipline that isn't tied to any one specific climb. Those assets travel with you no matter what the reroute looks like.
Plan: Once the official courses are released, we'll build the specifics together, pacing plans, fueling checkpoints, and gear choices around whatever route is confirmed. Until then, the plan is to keep training the qualities that transfer to virtually any version of this course.
Take Action: At some point, thinking has to give way to doing. Whatever the final course looks like, the way through is to execute the plan and not look back. Athletes who race well on an altered course are the ones who stop mourning the course they trained for and start racing the one in front of them, from the moment Ken blasts his shotgun.
Why This Matters More Than You'd Think: The GES Model
There's a useful piece of sport psychology research called the Goal-Expectancy-Self-Control (GES) model of mental toughness. It proposes that when athletes hit a stressor, like, say, a wildfire rerouting their goal race, mental toughness draws on three internal resources:
Goals that are already challenging and personally meaningful at baseline become even more threatened. You do not have to alter the spirit of why you signed up for Leadville in the first place: the goal of finishing strong, honoring months of hard training you've put in, and testing yourself at altitude can all remain valid. Now’s the time to reconnect to those goals that led to you signing up in the first place.
Self-efficacy: your belief that you can execute well in challenging environments, built from months of earned experience and increased fitness from your training. Look at your training and remind yourself of all that you’ve accomplished this season. Your fitness is there.
Self-control: to simultaneously honor the frustration, sadness, and uncertainty that you are experiencing and aligning your decision to keep training and race this season, or focus on another race later this year, or defer to next year by reconnecting to your deeper values embedded in training and racing. Giving yourself permission to balance both sides means your effort and your identity as an athlete aren't hostage to course decisions that are entirely out of your hands.
According to the model, when those three resources are in place, they translate into better attention (staying present instead of replaying what the course used to be), improved ability to sustain effort (through not deviating from your training plan), perseverance through the inevitable low points in both training and racing, and smarter in-race strategies, all of which are exactly what you need on race day regardless of which climbs are on the map.
The reroute doesn't touch any of these internal resources unless you let it. Your goal is still valid. Your fitness is still real. Your ability to manage your own head is still yours to practice, starting now, not just on race morning.
What You Can Continue to Do
Keep executing your training plan as written. Don't let ambiguity about the course become an excuse to coast.
Practice noticing "this isn't what I signed up for" thoughts without letting them dictate your effort in training. That rehearsal matters.
Wait for official updates from Life Time before making assumptions about the course. Controlled information beats speculation.
Talk to your coach about how you’re feeling. We can adjust the plan for this race or for your season, that's part of our job. But the adjustment will be precise, not panicked.
If Leadville Doesn't Go the Way You Hoped
However this season unfolds, the fitness, discipline, and mental skills you've built don't expire in August. If you're feeling like you want a second goal on the calendar, either as a backup or simply because you're not ready to be done racing this year, now is a great time to talk with us about fall race options. A strong fall goal can be exactly the kind of forward-looking target that keeps this season's training from feeling wasted, no matter what happens in Leadville. Reach out to your coach and let's map out what makes sense for you.
Whatever Leadville looks like this year, you've already done the hard part. Show up, ADAPT, and give it everything you've got, that's the commitment that was never really about one specific stretch of singletrack in the first place.
– Dr. Justin Ross, Endurance Coach and Human Performance Psychologist
July 19, 2026